Blind retrieves

Blind retrieves are about being able to handle and direct the dog at a distance, both on land and in water. The dog doesn’t know where the game or dummy is, so it is up to you to send the dog to the correct place. The dog needs to know hand signals and commands for going back (straight out from your left side), go left, go right and continue further back (from having it’s nose toward you turn 180 degrees around and run the other way).

The dog also needs to know the stop whistle (stop when you want it to) and hunt whistle (start to hunt in a small area where it’s standing). A complete blind retrieve, or cast, would then for example be go back, stop, go right, stop, hunt whistle, find dummy, pick it up and deliver it to the handler.

In this category you’ll find all our blog posts on blind retrieves, casting and handling.

A basic skill for blind retrieves – look straight ahead As you probably have noticed by now we often base our training on small parts – we break everything that we want to teach the dog down to small parts. We teach the dog these parts the best way we know (we want...

We did several great exercises in England at the Castleman’s gun dogs / Dogs for Life’s summer camp. Among other things, we did a double marked retrieve exercise that turned in to casting further out (a so called push back which means that we “push” the...

Sometimes people ask me if I am worried that two different types of training might confuse my dog. They want to know if it happens that my dog suddenly doesn’t know what to do. I do both obedience and gun dog training with my Cocker Spaniel Tassla. For a long time I...

Diesels and my last training session gave us some good information about what to we need to work more on. The theme of the training was “working in an assigned area”. First we fired a few shots and put out two dummies per dog where the dogs could see them. We then...

We’re really very happy about all the wonderful illustrations in the book made by our friend Jenny Nyberg. We love them so much that we wanted to share yet another one that didn’t fit into the book. Below is an example of an exercise suitable when you’ve made some...